


and swallow darkness whole

by mapped



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Angst, Dysfunctional Relationships, F/M, Face-Fucking, Grief/Mourning, Multi, Polyamory, Rough Sex, There is James/Thomas but the focus here is on Miranda, Vaginal Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-22
Updated: 2017-11-22
Packaged: 2019-02-05 07:17:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12789552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mapped/pseuds/mapped
Summary: Miranda, and what she can never be.





	and swallow darkness whole

**Author's Note:**

> Partly inspired by [this post by sidewaystime](http://sidewaystime.tumblr.com/post/161878341695/i-bet-miranda-and-james-had-some-really%22): "I bet Miranda and James had some really bordering-on-violent sex post murdering Alfred Hamilton and scared the everloving shit out of themselves because neither of them was in control."
> 
> Title from 'Emphasis' by Sleeping At Last.

She is standing up at the table, rising to her feet. She is filled with a kind of energy she has never known; she is a pure, candid well of light. James’ hands may be stained with blood, but he is not the villain here. She is not innocent, either. But how can Peter expect them to be shamed for what they have done, when he has profited from his cowardice and betrayal? How dare he still play the righteous hero and obscure his crimes? 

She will not be ashamed. She will be _avenged_.

Let her be Clytemnestra. Let her wield the axe this time. Let her be sprayed in blood—

* * *

While James is gone to kill Alfred Hamilton, she reads Aeschylus’ _Agamemnon_ over, and over, and over.

She waits for James on the shore, cloaked in night. She does not care who sees her, does not care about the whispers of Flint’s crew. She sent a piece of herself out to sea, and that piece has returned. She embraces James, to absorb that piece back into herself. But when she lets go of James, she sees that it is still there, and growing inside him; dark vines creep behind his eyes.

They take the cart back to the house. The dirt path is long and empty, stretching forth hungrily like the black tongue of a snake—she does not know whether they are riding into the snake’s mouth or away from it. Midway, he grasps her wrist with forefinger and thumb. She drops the reins and regards him. She imagines that she is a Delphic priestess and he a man seeking an oracle. His fingers tighten around her wrist, clasping numbly without further action. He doesn’t know what he’s looking for. But she does.

The seat on the cart does not allow her much space, but she opens her legs as far as she can and rucks her skirts up. She hears Alfred Hamilton’s voice as she does: _Keep both your mouth and your legs firmly shut._ In her mind, she laughs and laughs.

James stares at her, and then he is wrapping his arms around her and lifting her from the seat, carrying her with him as he jumps from the cart, boots landing with a thud on the ground. He lays her down on the grass, and she hears the clink of his belt as she licks her fingers and loosens herself for him. He presses inside her and she hooks her legs around his waist. He grunts and fucks her under a sky of bleak stars, an innumerable jury, silent and watching.

 _Try me_ , Miranda dares them. _Hang me. The guilt is mine._

Her hands slip under James’ shirt and her nails claw down his back. He growls and wrenches her arms away, and she lets him, lets him pin her wrists above her head, lets him plunge deep inside her, lets him thrash gracelessly atop her like a dying man.

When he is done, they climb back onto the cart, and he takes the reins and moodily drives them onward. Her wrists ache.

The hearth-fire is still alight when they arrive at the house. She had been looking at the portrait again before leaving the house and had left it lying brazenly on the table. James gapes at it as if he has never seen it before, as if he has never seen a painting in his whole life.

The portrait was done years before James came into their lives. They were newly married, then, and they were happy, even though they did not know yet how much happier they could be, nor had they ever so much as glimpsed misery’s face and habit. Misery, Miranda thinks, wears James’ face, and a long black coat that billows in the wind.

James makes a pained noise at the back of his throat. She puts her hands on his shoulders, and sees that there is blood under her nails; she did not think she had scratched him as hard as that while they were outside, but evidently she had.

He turns and kisses her, ravening as a wolf. As he kisses her, he urges her towards the table; the edge of it bumps against the back of her thighs and she perches on the surface and spreads her legs easily. _I will open them whenever I please. I will open them and open them and open them._ James groans when he touches her, finding her cunt still dripping with his seed.

She welcomes him in again, and hugs him close to her, her hips rolling to meet his thrusts. The table quakes with the force of their coupling, creaking and scraping against the floor; soon he puts his hands under her arse and she squeezes his waist tight with her legs as he picks her up. She shivers, overwhelmed at being held like this, at the feeling of him thick and undeniable inside her. But she still cannot get that piece of herself back; she suspects she has permanently lost it to James, that it has moulded itself snugly to his heart and will never be parted from him.

He walks into the kitchen with her coiled around him and he sits on the bed there. “Tell me,” she murmurs, stroking his short hair, mourning the length it used to be. “Tell me what it was like.”

“It was Hell,” he says, into the crook of her neck. “I opened a gate to Hell and I descended into it and wreathed myself in its flames.”

She tugs on the strands of his hair and he moans, the broad span of his shoulders shuddering. “Who did you kill first?”

“Him.” James bites into her neck, and she rocks down into his lap. “I should have killed her first, made him watch and understand what it was he would suffer. But I saw him, his repugnant… _loathsome_ face, and I could not delay a moment longer.”

She pushes him down with her hands on his chest. “ _Tell_ me,” she demands, her hips sliding against his. “How did you do it?”

He gazes up at her. “I drew my sword and I cut his face. Sliced it across forehead and nose and liver-spotted cheek.” He spits the syllables. 

“And then?”

“I don’t remember the rest.” He turns his head to the side, but she cannot have that. She grabs his chin and forces him to look at her again.

“Was there a lot of blood?”

“So much blood,” James says, closing his eyes. “I was awash in it. It was so red, Miranda.” She does not like his closed eyes; he is seeing something she will never see, the scene aboard that ship, the deaths he made, the Hell he carved from his own sword. All while she had been in this very room, stirring soup that bubbled over the fire as she read Clytemnestra’s shameless confession: _I stand where I dealt the blow, over the deeds that I have done._

Her hand slips from his chin to his neck, and her fingers dig into it, choking him so that he opens his eyes, and embers of rage smoulder in them as he looks at her. He clutches her waist with those killing hands and bucks up into her, brutal and wonderful.

She rides him just as hard, slamming her hips down as she cries out. It is not pleasure but agony. A necessary thing to prevent further pain; like stitches, or cauterisation. She wants to scream: _He is dead!_

She does not know whether she means Alfred or Thomas. Only that those facts are now one and the same.

When she looks down at James, she thinks of that hallway in the house in London that she had never liked, with the two gilded mirrors that faced each other, engendering a disquieting infinity of reflections; twin abysses. She thinks perhaps she was the only mirror once—that once upon a time, James could look into her and see himself rendered in stunning clarity; revealed. But now, she and James are two mirrors hanging on opposite walls, reflecting each other into a fathomless, unending dark, into the indifferent chaos that existed before creation, into the unmaking of both their selves.

“Tell me he begged for his life.” She is breathless and her voice is a desperate, pleading whine. Her hold on James’ throat weakens.

“He _begged_.”

She gasps above James, her orgasm running through her like a furrow through soil. A tremor passes through her as she inhales, and after a moment, she sinks to her knees between James’ legs, her limbs fluid and heavy as wine. She takes him into her mouth and he sits up and looks helplessly down at her. “ _Fuck_ ,” he groans. “Christ.” His hips jerk forward and his cock glides further along her tongue, and his hand is in her hair, and his eyes are wide, greener than the Eden that Eve saw when the juice of the forbidden fruit trickled down her chin. He pulls her hair and cups her chin with a bruising grip and fucks into her mouth, and she knows that if she could, she would murder for him.

She shakes free of his grasp and plies his cock with both her hands until he spends upon her face, in wet, hot splatters.

Her eyes sting. Heedless, she licks her lips and recites in a low voice, as if saying an incantation: “ _Breathing out a quick spurt of blood, he struck me with a dark shower of blood-red dew, while I rejoiced no less than the sown earth does in heaven-sent rain, at the bursting of the buds._ ”

James’ hands tremble before her, not touching her. “Miranda, it is… It is not like that. Oh _God_ ”—he sucks in a sharp breath, lashed by emotion as though it were a physical force—“Miranda.”

She wipes her face with the frilly cuffs of her sleeves and smooths her skirts down. James raises his hands and rubs his face and moans. She witnesses his anguish and thinks to herself that it will only be temporary. This grief that sands down both their bones to dust—it will not be forever. The appropriate sacrifices have been made; surely they can lay Thomas’ ghost to rest at last, and their lives can begin again? It may require another few years, but she is hopeful. She is determined.

She is terrified.

“What the fuck were we _doing_?” James asks, in a hollow voice, through the gaps between his fingers. “What _was_ that?”

“Discovery,” Miranda answers. Her airy voice surprises her, not matching the constriction in her lungs, the rabbit-swift thumps of her heart. “Bringing to the light things that the world tells us we should leave in the dark, as we have always done.” She doesn’t know this woman whose hands itch to close around something—a throat; a hilt—and hold fast. But she knows her better than she did an hour ago. It is a fearful thing, but exhilarating, too. So rare, these days, to stumble upon anything new and unknown.

James’ hands fall, twitching, from his face. “What if the world is right, and these are things that ought to be left in the dark?” He brushes his thumb against her chin, as gentle as a moth. He does not apologise, and she does not want him to, but his eyes are watery with remorse.

“I do not care,” she says. “I have never desired to be right, merely to be happy. And happiness is not found in ignorance and denial.”

She sees that James is not satisfied with that—because he has a fervent need to be right, just as Thomas did—but he nods thoughtfully and twines his fingers in her hair. She kisses his knuckles and his wrists; inwardly she thanks them for what they have done. She cannot regret asking it of James, but all the same she wishes she could have borne the burden herself. It would have weighed less on her.

She leads James to her bedroom, and he chooses _Meditations_ from the shelf. She reads to him. After a week’s immersion in the dread and frenzy of an Aeschylean tragedy, and the violent thrall of Clytemnestra’s gloating speech, Stoic philosophy seems as distant and incomprehensible as a dream upon waking, but it is comforting, too, like coming home out of the cold, something she has not done in far too long.

“ _What doesn’t transmit light creates its own darkness._ ”

James looks blank, like a curtain drawn down over a window to keep out the sun.

After that night, he never asks her to read from the _Meditations_ again.

* * *

While James is gone to the Bahama Islands, she finds Marcus Aurelius’ _Meditations_ at the foot of her and Thomas’ bed one morning.

She thinks Thomas has been missing James especially—her husband turns to the Good Emperor whenever he is suffering from any kind of distress. James has been gone nearly three months, and she dearly misses him, too. In bed, his hair falling over his face like autumn distilled, or like a glass of brandy in firelight. The dimple in his cheek; the sweet quirk of his mouth, that expresses such a charming mixture of scepticism and amusement and awe. The way he looks so intently at her and listens to her as though she were a teacher and he a pupil in her great academy.

She turns the cover, and there on the front page, in Thomas’ neat hand, is an inscription that was previously absent.

She blinks at it, does not understand why there is such a pain in her chest.

In the first few years of her marriage, she would come back from a lover’s to find Thomas engrossed in the recollection of an equally recent tryst, ink blotting on the page of whatever document he was working on. He was so prone to distraction in his youth, to a mind that flitted from one fantasy to another—sexual one instant and political the next. It had been difficult, despite her pleasure and her delight, her enjoyment of a paramour’s company, to overcome that oppressive feeling of a thundercloud inside her when she was with a man who wasn’t her husband, a gale of voices that told her that what she was doing was wrong, that she should be ashamed of herself. Each time Thomas’ attention returned to her with a warm smile, it was a relief to see that he was still the same, unchanged towards her.

Her affairs allowed them both their own separate happinesses, and made this joint happiness possible, this place where they met and understood each other uniquely and deeply, achieving a kind of parity and unity she did not believe any other wedded couple in her circles were able to approach. This place where they both belonged and were free.

“Know no shame,” she whispered once, seeing Thomas in a reverie, his finger tracing along his lips. It was a promise to herself, a commitment to their marriage. A credo of a new faith.

“What was that, my dear?” Thomas asked her, looking up.

“I said, you know no shame, husband.”

Thomas blushed, and laughed. “Neither do you.”

She looks at those words inked on the page now: _Know no shame._ Those are not the words that hurt her. The unlearning of one’s shame is a lesson that she herself has gladly been trying to teach James. Under that tenet they will be a church of three.

But the rest of the inscription…

She wonders, then, who _her_ truest love is. She does not think she has one. A truest love! What a thing to have; what a thing to say. She loves Thomas; she loves James. Neither of those facts is truer than the other.

Silly, to prod at one word like this—to let it prod at her. Has she not known for a long time that what James and Thomas feel for each other is akin to a mountain? Something that rises too high to be measured, its peak lofty and invisible beyond the clouds. It cannot be climbed. Her love for Thomas is a secluded, well-flowered valley, and her love for James a lucid river that runs through it. They are all true things, none more so than the others. But a mountain is a mountain. It is a hefty thing. And so perhaps there is no word for it but ‘truest’.

Still, it is not something she would ever elect to say to anyone.

At breakfast, she raises the subject: “Darling, about the book you left lying on our bed...”

Thomas drops his buttered toast onto his plate. “You saw it!” His eyes are creased with excitement, and it makes her even more hesitant. “You read the inscription?” 

She nods.

“What did you think? I am hoping to gift it to James.”

“I’m sure he would be very appreciative,” she says, and then she has to ask herself: would _James_ read the inscription and dwell on that one word, attempt to decipher its meaning as she has? Would he sketch his fingers along ‘truest’ and feel a quiet, triumphant joy that he is Thomas’ truest love? Or would he have any sympathy for the ache in her chest, that so many years of marriage have been diminished by a single word?

“That is reassuring to hear,” Thomas says. “It was not an easy task, to select only a few words for this purpose, when there is always so much I wish to say to him, when we can spend all day and night talking to each other and never tire of it. We have been apart for nigh on three months with no communication. I could write him an epic!”

He chuckles and resumes eating his toast, and Miranda pours herself a cup of tea and mulls over it a little longer.

“Only, I must confess, the word ‘truest’ pricked my heart,” she says, holding the cup steady as she can. Her tongue is a little scalded by the tea.

“Oh.” Thomas frowns, and then his eyes widen. He reaches out and touches Miranda’s hand, clasping her fingers. “I didn’t think… It was not meant to imply your inferiority in any way. I do not know how to say this without making it sound as if I think less of you than I do him. But what I feel for him transcends everything I have ever felt. Miranda, I do not think I would have known how to love him absolutely if I did not already love you, too. The way he sees you... The way he sees both of us, together. No one else has ever attained such a complete and honest understanding of who we are—our passions and our convictions, our ambitions and our capacities for love. It is a truer thing, because it encompasses not just who _I_ am as a person, but who _we_ are as two souls joined in one.”

Miranda sees the way Thomas gains momentum as he speaks, the words tumbling from him more and more earnestly. There is no way to be certain that Thomas has not just conjured that explanation on the spot, and even if he has, that is not to say that it does not hold any truth. It is a beautiful explanation, regardless.

She plants a kiss on the back of Thomas’ hand and changes the subject.

Nonetheless, she cannot stop herself from going back to the inscription again and again, like a lock of hair that’s sprung loose from a pin and that she must keep tucking behind her ear. At times, she covers James’ name when she reads it, and wonders how she would feel were it addressed to her instead. It is difficult to imagine, but she does not think it would cause her any less unease. It is simply not what she believes love ought to be.

In the end, it is she who gives the _Meditations_ to James. She packs it in a hurry when they have to leave London, with a change of clothes and precious few other books, and on the ship to the New World, she hands it to him without feeling much of anything at all, and watches him crumple like paper.

* * *

He is standing up at the table, rising to his feet. He tells Alfred Hamilton to leave the house, and he is the brightest thing she has ever seen, brighter than all the candles in the room, brighter than was the sun the day she and Thomas met.

Brighter than Thomas himself.

When they kiss, she cannot look. It is impossible to look at something as blinding as that. But even so, she can feel it burning its shape into the fabric of her life—of all their lives—scorching a singular hole, as perfect as a halo; as damning as a noose.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are really appreciated! <3 Come talk to me on [tumblr](http://reluming.tumblr.com) about your Miranda feelings.
> 
> (I cried myself to sleep over Miranda the other night. Can you believe it's been nearly eight months since Black Sails ended and I'm still in so much pain over her tragedy?)


End file.
